Despite the current price war Samsung developers work on performance of their SSDs in addition to value. And Samsung 840 EVO is the result of such work. This SSD is one of the greatest technologically advanced drive for consumer market today.

Intel NAS Performance Toolkit

Intel NASPT is another disk sub-system test that employs real-life usage scenarios. Like PCMark 8, Intel NASPT reproduces predefined disk activity traces and measures how fast they are executed. However, the default traces are designed for network attached storage devices rather than for SSDs. Therefore during our test session we replace them with the specially developed SSD Benchmarking Suite which offers more relevant usage scenarios such as compressing and decompressing files, compiling large projects, copying files and folders, loading 3D game levels, installing software, batch-processing photos, searching a digital library for data, mass-launching applications, and transcoding video.

Like PCMark 8, this benchmark gives us a true-to-life illustration of disk subsystem performance. Here the SSDs are again tested in their “steady” state.

The leader Samsung 840 Pro is followed by the Samsung 840 EVO in this benchmark, too. Interestingly, by combining technologies from the 840 Pro and the 840 models, Samsung has created an SSD that is in between them in performance. That’s quite enough for the new drive to beat most of the flagship products from other brands.

Besides the average benchmark score, we would also like to offer you the results of individual usage scenarios, which explain the overall results of the Samsung 840 EVO. Take note that the data-transfer rate is higher than the SATA interface bandwidth in some subtests. That’s because INASPT is a high-level benchmark that uses standard Windows functions to access the disk subsystem. The OS’s caching mechanisms come into play then.

It is easy to explain the numbers we see in these charts. The Samsung 840 EVO falls behind its opponents whenever it is required to write a lot of data continuously like in the file copy and software installation scenarios. Otherwise, the 840 EVO is confidently in the top part of each diagram. It is even occasionally ahead of the flagship Samsung 840 Pro model thanks to the MEX controller's higher speed of random-address reading.